One of the key features in any good zombie film is the gore. Sanj here once again – i.e. the zombie in the propeller beanie.
When I think back on Night of the Living Dead, I always fondly remember the sequence where a guy and girl leave the house to try to get to a truck that ends up exploding leaving the zombies with a nice barbecue. And don’t even get me started on Dawn of the Dead (the original).
There are so many scenes of over the top gore in that one, it’s hard to pick favorites, but for me the ones that stick out are the zombie having the top of his head taken off by a helicopter rotor, or the biker being ripped apart and consumed by the zombies towards the end of the film.
It was with jubilant thoughts such as these that John and I dove into zombie filmmaking and started learning how to do blood and guts with no budget. One of the more interesting things we came across was the use of edible vs. in-edible blood. While stage blood can be purchase in gallon sized jugs and looks great spattered on clothes and dripping down your face, it just doesn’t seem like the kind of thing you want to go putting in your mouth.
Related: Undeath Got You Down? For Zombies Has the Answer!
The blood we use for effects where we are going to eat body parts is made of:
- 3 parts corn syrup
- 1 part water
- red food coloring
- chocolate sauce to taste (it also darkens up the liquid)
The final result looks – well – disturbing…
Camp Jefferson is two hours from home. It made for a long drive up and back. We went with Dan Mooney of Tin Machine Films and had a chance to talk shop and plan for the next project. There’s a collaboration in the future. The event was attended by local filmmakers, actors, mark up artists and horror fans, including a rather creepy priest, Father Evil. We’re not sure, but we think we smelled brimstone and heard chants in Latin. It’s a good venue to compare filmmaking notes, learn about other local events, like Grindhouse Nights at Café Z, exchange business cards and meet new friends.
Related: Grilling For Zombies – Have a Heart
More blood with those guts?
When we made First Aid for Zombies, we decided we wanted to take a guy’s leg off. This is much easier to say than do, particularly if you don’t want to hurt the guy. Our friend, Jim, volunteered for the job of zombie lunch.
The day of the shoot, we had some ideas about how we were going to take his leg off, but we weren’t sure if they would work. For an earlier shot, we showed him with a broken leg, which we shot by having him wear a pair of sweat pants and then cut one of the legs out so he could fold his real leg back out of view from the camera and then stuffing the bottom of his visible “leg” and bending it at an awkward angle.
Zombie Casserole screened before The Soulless and we were there for an introduction and Q&A. We’ve seen the film more times than we’d like to admit, so we were paying more attention to the audience and the reactions. There was laughter at all the right locations, including a scene where a character accidently blows his head off with a shotgun. Jay K hosted the Q&A session and we got a bunch of good questions, both from him and the audience.
Notable, we were asked about Baxter Guilfoyle’s performance as Zombie Fred, the horde leader. He channels Malcolm X as he rallies the horde in an entirely ad lib performance. The final and fitting comment we got was from Art Bontio, “You guys are weird!” A fine complement as any, we take pride in it.
Camp Jefferson is two hours from home. It made for a long drive up and back. We went with Dan Mooney of Tin Machine Films and had a chance to talk shop and plan for the next project. There’s a collaboration in the future.
The event was attended by local filmmakers, actors, mark up artists and horror fans, including a rather creepy priest, Father Evil. We’re not sure, but we think we smelled brimstone and heard chants in Latin. It’s a good venue to compare filmmaking notes, learn about other local events, like Grindhouse Nights at Café Z, exchange business cards and meet new friends.
Jim’s “broken” leg
We applied the same technique when we took his leg off, but dressed the top of his leg and the fake leg with lots of blood and meat jello. Meat Jello is a particularly noxious looking combination of Jello, food coloring and evaporated milk, which looks absolutely disgusting, and tastes like fruit punch with evaporated milk in it – I’ll let you decide how appetizing it really is; however, because we care about our zombies, it is one-hundred percent edible.
Mmmmm…jello…
When we shot the scene, John and I didn’t pull the leg far enough away from the stump because I think we were too concerned with it falling apart on us – but in hindsight we would have been just fine.